News

the key to happiness

Author:Finehope

Source:Finehope

Release on :2015-11-17

Note to self: the key to happiness is
keeping a diary and writing down the things that make you smile.

For while fictional diarists Bridget Jones
and Adrian Mole used journals to record their woes and embarrassments, paying
attention to the things that lift our moods mean we can learn how to cheer
ourselves up, says a leading physicist.

Author Dr Stefan Klein has found that being
happy is a skill that can be learned like a foreign language, and one way to
train ourselves to be happy is to write down the little things that cheer us up
each day – a technique he practises himself. Dr Klein, who analysed
psychological research for his book The Science of Happiness, added he often
writes about his three young children, despite occasionally finding them
‘incredibly annoying’. Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, the
German-born researcher said that decades of study into happiness has shown that
people who are clinically depressed often believe there are no sources of joy
in their lives.

But a study by Italian psychiatrist
Giovanni Fava found that when patients were asked to keep diaries of events
that made them happy, it ‘helped them a lot to get better’.

Dr Klein said: ‘It is incredibly simple –
you just sit down in the evening and write down the moments where you feel
happy and the circumstances.

‘The object of the exercise is to simply make you more aware of these
moments to know yourself better. ‘Even in states of severe depression there are
moments of happiness, but the person suffering it doesn’t believe they have
these moments in their lives.’ And if you decide to take Dr Klein’s advice, you
can make yourself even happier by recommending the technique to others.

Happiness occurs when the brain releases
endorphins – chemicals that trigger positive feelings – and scientists have
found this occurs not only when we achieve one of our own goals, but when we
help someone else achieve theirs. Dr Klein added it is important not to dwell
on the times we felt sad, saying: ‘Going deep down into your negative feelings,
[the idea] it has a cathartic effect, and you have to cry your tears out and
shout your fears out, is really c**p’.’ The idea we should delve into our
sadness became popular under Sigmund Freud, who saw the mind as a pressure
cooker that needed to let out steam. But Dr Klein argued this was a ‘misguided
analogy’.